For Christmas I got an interesting gift from a buddy - my really own "best-selling" book.

"Tech-Splaining for Dummies" (great title) bears my name and forum.pinoo.com.tr my image on its cover, and it has glowing evaluations.

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a couple of basic prompts about me supplied by my buddy Janet.

It's a fascinating read, and uproarious in parts. But it likewise meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty design of writing, but it's likewise a bit repeated, classifieds.ocala-news.com and extremely verbose. It might have gone beyond Janet's prompts in looking at data about me.

Several sentences start "as a leading innovation journalist ..." - cringe - which could have been scraped from an online bio.

There's likewise a mystical, repetitive hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no family pets). And there's a metaphor on nearly every page - some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I called the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he informed me he had sold around 150,000 customised books, generally in the US, considering that pivoting from assembling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller expenses ₤ 26. The firm utilizes its own AI tools to produce them, based on an open source large language design.

I'm not asking you to purchase my book. Actually you can't - only Janet, who produced it, can purchase any additional copies.

There is currently no barrier to anybody developing one in any person's name, including celebs - although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive material. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, produced by AI, and created "exclusively to bring humour and joy".

Legally, the copyright comes from the company, however Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a "customised gag present", and parentingliteracy.com the books do not get sold even more.

He intends to expand his variety, producing various categories such as sci-fi, and possibly providing an autobiography service. It's designed to be a light-hearted kind of customer AI - selling AI-generated products to human customers.

It's also a bit scary if, like me, you write for a living. Not least due to the fact that it probably took less than a minute to create, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound much like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have revealed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then produce comparable content based upon it.

"We ought to be clear, when we are speaking about information here, we actually mean human creators' life works," states Ed Newton Rex, creator of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect developers' rights.

"This is books, this is posts, this is photos. It's artworks. It's records ... The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and after that do more like that."

In 2023 a song including AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social networks before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn't stop the track's developer trying to choose it for a Grammy award. And although the artists were phony, it was still wildly popular.

"I do not believe making use of generative AI for imaginative functions must be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on individuals's work without permission must be prohibited," Mr Newton Rex adds. "AI can be extremely powerful however let's construct it fairly and fairly."

OpenAI says Chinese competitors utilizing its work for their AI apps

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

China's DeepSeek AI shakes market and damages America's swagger

In the UK some organisations - consisting of the BBC - have actually selected to block AI developers from trawling their online material for training functions. Others have chosen to collaborate - the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for instance.

The UK government is thinking about an overhaul of the law that would enable AI developers to utilize creators' content on the web to help develop their designs, unless the rights holders pull out.

Ed Newton Rex describes this as "insanity".

He explains that AI can make advances in locations like defence, health care and clashofcryptos.trade logistics without trawling the work of authors, reporters and artists.

"All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and ruining the incomes of the country's creatives," he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is likewise strongly versus removing copyright law for AI.

"Creative markets are wealth developers, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of delight," states the Baroness, who is likewise a consultant to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

"The government is weakening among its finest carrying out markets on the unclear pledge of development."

A federal government spokesperson said: "No move will be made till we are definitely positive we have a practical strategy that provides each of our goals: increased control for ideal holders to assist them accredit their material, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for ideal holders from AI designers."

Under the UK federal government's brand-new AI strategy, a nationwide information library consisting of public information from a vast array of sources will likewise be provided to AI scientists.

In the US the future of federal guidelines to manage AI is now up in the air following President Trump's return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to enhance the security of AI with, amongst other things, companies in the sector needed to share details of the operations of their systems with the US federal government before they are launched.

But this has now been rescinded by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is stated to want the AI sector to face less guideline.

This comes as a variety of claims versus AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have actually been gotten by everybody from the New york city Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI companies broke the law when they took their material from the web without their approval, and utilized it to train their systems.

The AI that their actions fall under "fair use" and are therefore exempt. There are a variety of aspects which can constitute reasonable use - it's not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it should be spending for it.

If this wasn't all adequate to contemplate, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has actually shaken the sector over the past week. It ended up being the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it established its technology for a fraction of the rate of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has actually raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American's current supremacy of the sector.

When it comes to me and a career as an author, I believe that at the minute, if I actually want a "bestseller" I'll still need to compose it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for larger projects. It has plenty of errors and hallucinations, and it can be rather hard to read in parts due to the fact that it's so long-winded.

But offered how rapidly the tech is evolving, I'm uncertain for how long I can stay confident that my considerably slower human writing and modifying abilities, are better.

Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the most significant advancements in global innovation, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the world.

Outside the UK? Sign up here.